I hadn’t heard of Jubensha until a few days ago, but Jubensha script murder games are a kind of Chinese murder mystery game – and they’re huge! Here’s the video that introduced them to me. (You don’t need to watch the whole thing – the first five or ten minutes give you a pretty good idea of what jubensha involves.)...
France Murder, our French partner has just published Le Pharaon Maudit, a translation of Curse of the Pharaoh. Le Pharaon Maudit is a murder mystery game for 7 to 19 guests and is set at an archaeological dig in Egypt in the 1890s.There's also an introductory video on along with photos of the playtest, both on Facebook. Click here to learn more...
Following on from our birthday post last month, I thought it would be interesting to show when we published each game. I’ve excluded translations to keep things simple… 2001 Death on the Gambia by Steve Hatherley 2002 Murder at Sea by Chris Boote (Murder at Sea was originally All at Sea, we later changed its name) Curse of the Pharaoh by Mo...
Twenty years ago, on 9th October 2001, Freeform Games was incorporated. So that’s the day we celebrate as our birthday. We made our first sale ten weeks later, on 17th December. Way out West In 2001… There was no iPhone, iPad, Facebook or Twitter. Google was three years old, and Amazon was nothing like the behemoth it is now. And Microsoft’s...
We've just released another game specifically designed to be played online during this unprecedented lockdown – Death in Venice. Death in Venice is for 5-9 players (and one host) and is again designed to be played using video chat (Zoom, Hangouts, or whatever your favourite is). Last night at the glamorous Venice Film Festival, controversial...
To help with those Coronavirus lockdown blues, we've just released our latest game - Reunion with Death. Reunion with Death is for 6-9 players (and one host as usual) and has been written to be played online in lockdown, using video chat. We've included detailed instructions for using Google Hangouts, but you can use any system that you are...
Here's a roundup of murder mystery party games by Hexagamers. They’ve taken a good long look at the various murder mystery companies that you can find on the internet and are trying them out to judge which really are the best. Happily, we’re in the list - but they have yet to try one of our games. We’re looking forward to their feedback when they...
Cornelius and Janice conspiring on the balcony We don’t often get to play our games, but last weekend I played in A Will to Murder. Guy, one of my tabletop roleplaying friends, had bought A Will to Murder, and wanted to try one it with some of his friends. Although he didn’t ask me to run it (I thought he was going to), I said I was happy to play...
Back on 20th July we ran a playtest of our new game Death on the Rocks, in London. Playtesting is an important part of our development process. However well a murder mystery game’s been written and edited, it can’t be considered finished until it’s been thoroughly tested. We call it ‘playtesting’ because it takes the form of playing through the...
Last year I talked about how Mo and I attended The King’s Musketeers, a weekend long freeform. This year’s weekend game was Cafe Casablanca, and while Mo played Philip Marlowe, I was one of the six “directors” (ie, a host). Mo, looking very dapper as Philip Marlowe Cafe Casablanca is based on Hollywood thrillers and wartime dramas of the ‘30s and...